New approach for modeling, analysis, and control of air traffic flow

An Eulerian approach to modeling air traffic flow is advanced. This modeling technique spatially aggregates air traffic to generate models of air traffic flow in a network of interconnected, one-dimensional control volumes. The approach simplifies the problem of characterizing the air traffic flow because the order of the corresponding airspace model depends only on the number of spatial control volumes used to represent the air traffic environment and not on the number of aircraft operating in it. Under a quasi-steady-state assumption, this process results in linear models of the air traffic environment. It is shown that analysis and design methods from linear control theory can be applied to this model to yield useful approaches for characterizing and controlling the air traffic flow.